Brownfield Revitalization and Remediation Act
This bill, titled the Brownfield Revitalization and Remediation Act, aims to restore and expand the tax treatment of environmental cleanup costs under the Internal Revenue Code. Specifically, it seeks to bring back expensing (deducting in the year paid or incurred) for qualified environmental remediation expenditures and broaden what can be expensed. The bill also adds certain remediation-related costs (assessment, investigation, and monitoring) and includes a special rule related to brownfield sites, while clarifying how pollutants and contaminants are treated for these purposes. The amendments take effect immediately upon enactment. Key elements include (1) re-establishing and expanding the ability to expense remediation costs, (2) broadening the types of costs eligible for expensing, (3) creating a special treatment rule for depreciable property tied to brownfield sites, (4) extending the definition of hazardous substances to include pollutants and contaminants as defined under CERCLA, and (5) an immediate effective date.
Key Points
- 1Restoring expensing of qualified environmental remediation expenditures
- 2- The bill rewrites the relevant tax provision to re-enable expensing for remediation costs, with terms that reference when the section does or does not apply to certain expenditures.
- 3Expanding eligible costs for expensing
- 4- Includes reasonable costs for assessment, investigation, and monitoring of a site in connection with remediation or abatement activities, broadening what can be expensed in the year paid or incurred.
- 5Special rule for brownfield sites
- 6- Adds a rule specific to depreciable property tied to brownfield sites, clarifying that brownfield sites are treated differently from other qualified contaminated sites under the depreciation/expensing framework.
- 7Broader treatment of hazardous substances
- 8- Expands the category of substances treated as hazardous for purposes of the expensing provision to include pollutants or contaminants as defined in CERCLA.
- 9Immediate effective date
- 10- All amendments take effect on the date of enactment, making the changes applicable as soon as the bill becomes law.